This fact-filled CounterPunch dispatch from Brett Wilkins traces how the CIA exported torture techniques to one South American country, Uruguay, via an instructional manual entitled KUBARK.
Fifty years ago, one of the top officials in the U.S. torture program in Uruguay , Dan Mitrione, was kidnapped and later executed by left-wing guerrillas. One of the guerrilla leaders talks about why Mitrione was targeted.
This history is not irrelevant today, Wilkins observes.
Although Dan Mitrione has been dead for half a century, his legacy lives on in the words and deeds of a new generation of US torturers. Many of the psychological and “no-touch” tortures he pioneered and practiced led to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the US war on terrorism, Guantánamo Bay and CIA “black sites.” Mitrione’s methodical approach to torture — “a premature death means failure by the technician” — echoes in the words of unrepentant Bush-era torturers and their apologists like John Yoo
Source: Teaching Torture: The Death and Legacy of Dan Mitrione – CounterPunch.org
